Television viewers commonly do not know what is on television at a given time and wish to just browse or “channel surf” to see what is on rather than look up their programming guide. This allows viewers to see snippets of various programs that are currently being broadcast. Traditionally this is performed by pressing the “channel up” button on a television, cable box, or satellite receiver remote control. This results in the channels being cycled through in the numerical order assigned by the FCC, cable company, or satellite company. The channel numbering is usually set by a cable or satellite company based on business decisions, e.g., to locate all of the major networks clustered in the lower channels.
In some systems, users can mark channels as favorites and then only channel surf through the channels marked as favorites. This helps in that some channels that the viewer never watches, such as shopping channels, preview channels, or channels not in the viewer's native language, are excluded in the surfing. However, this has a drawback in that the set of channels the user marked as favorites is usually a small subset of the overall set of channels, so the majority of the content is not included in the channel surfing. Moreover, the order of channels is still restricted to be numerical.
Even if channel surfing is limited to channels marked as favorites, many users are annoyed when channel surfing if they channel surf to a channel showing a commercial, in which case the user cannot determine the programming on the channel. The user can continue channel surfing, but until the channel is reached again while surfing, the user is unaware of content available on the channel.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.